I've always been amazed by how unusable the play store was. I'd actually like to browse apps sometimes, but it always was choke full of useless ads pushing the worst apps possible. I only go there once every blue moon when I exactly know what I want, download it and get out of there.
I'll just point out this isn't only an Android issue.
If there any IT person here who has had to direct an employee to download the Microsoft authenticator app from the iPhone App Store, you've almost certainly seen that it promotes a deceptively similar looking authenticator above the Microsoft one, and you have to make sure the user knows not to download it.
Not quite. If your currently connected devices are not (supposedly) compatible because then it will not show up even if it is still on the store.
Google doesnt even tell you that way and you might assume it's not there.
I tried it multiple times and had no issues installing the apk from apkmirror and using the app.
No, it did really happen. Usually with apps that didn't have very high installation counts. I have first hand experience with it as the author and publisher of an app. People could literally search for the exact name of my app and get all kinds of other results, but not my app. I'd have to send them a direct link to the listing.
Yeah, I've been geofenced from certain apps for forever for some reason. Google knows I'm German, Google knows I'm in Germany and yet I can't download the official German gov Covid tracking app because "it isn't available in your region". So I've gotten quite familiar with the aurora store instead 🤷♂️
It had problems with the rate limited accounts for the last months, but I think they're fixed now. I haven't had any problem in the last weeks. If you keep getting these messages I'd recommend clearing app data and starting a new anonymous login session.
Ads in any kind of app store search should SUPER NOT BE ALLOWED. Microsoft does it, Google does it, even the Apple app store has it. I don't want my grandma to be looking for her bank app and download Fast Cash Transfer Free 2024 Edition instead
I used to think the same thing: first three results or so are always ads, so just ignore. And then recently they've changed to be 90% ads even after the initial few. It's hard to find something that someone hasn't paid to display :(
Yeah that's the part that is frustrating. It's such an aggressive implementation of a dark pattern knowing the users muscle memory. It's akin to suddenly switching the placement of 'Accept'/'Decline' after years of being in the same place.
What surprises me is that it feels more like a money grab from a struggling app than the company in charge of ads across a large percentage of the world.
It pulls everything (apps, metadata, search results, etc.) directly from Google Play. It's entirely free and open source and recommended by almost everyone in the Android and privacy community, so yes, it's definitely legit.
Yeah I think it's pretty wack. If I search doordash then Uber eats will be the first result or if I search Uber eats then doordash will be the first result lol the ads are getting so extreme it pretty much evens out in the end and it's all completely pointless aside from making everything more annoying for the user
Remember, the end user is always the one paying for the ads. Either by the company making you pay more for their products (Apple) or taking bigger cuts from whatever they mediate (Uber, Doordash).
This has always been the case in Google search (you know the search engine Google started with as a company). Drove me crazy when I would see an old person click the AD link instead of the actual search result
If you're against this kind of behavior, you should advocate that Android/iOS are platforms and not products, so that centralized app stores are a medium for developers and not a proprietary product under one company.
Play Store doing this since September, at least in my region (SE Asia). If you disabled personalized ads on your Google Account, Play Store homepage displays ads that are frequently installed from your country/state.
Indeed. Most apps I got on the homepage, mostly fast cash lending apps, were developed from China, and then outsourced its customer-based services to my country.
I don't mind it so much as it makes it hard to find the actual application I'm looking for most of the time. Your case here is a perfect example of this.
Google has done crappy "suggested results" for so many years now that I automatically ignore the top results from any Google search, so all this does is make it harder to find things :-(